To balance supply and demand of electric power, such a control scheme as so-called a demand response (DR) is known, in which a customer or demander positively responds to a request (demand) for supply/demand adjustment issued from an electric power system.
For a customer with a plurality of home appliances, there is a method of controlling the appliances by communication for the demand response. In this method, an electric power control apparatus with a communication function collects, from an air conditioner, an illumination device, etc., various types of information, such as information indicating the relationship between the operation state and the consumption of power, user set data, and information indicating the current power consumption value, and transmits an operation control signal to each home appliance to respond to a request for supply/demand adjustment upon receiving the request from an electric power system.
In the scheme in which the electric power control apparatus transmits an operation control signal to each home appliance, the electric power control apparatus must exchange a large number of parameters with the home appliances to determine the policy of power adjustment and transmit a control command to the appliances, in order to deal with various combinations of home appliances, or variation in structure due to addition or discard of an appliance. This requires a power control apparatus of high performance and inevitably requires high cost for it.